


headspin, happiness, death

by homeschoolvaledictorian



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Brotherly Bonding, Gen, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-13 05:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14742726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homeschoolvaledictorian/pseuds/homeschoolvaledictorian
Summary: Dick Grayson is not running away, exactly. But with Wally's death weeks fresh and his grief and self-doubt eating him alive, he's taking a break from life.Too bad life isn't taking a break from him. Too soon, Dick is stranded across the country and a ten-year-old brat claiming to be the son of Talia al Ghul and the Batman is demanding that he take him to Bruce. Who is, incidentally, missing.AKA: the road trip neither Dick nor Damian knew they needed.





	headspin, happiness, death

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own any DC characters.
> 
> Dick gets some good advice, clears his head, and promptly gets some bad news.

The world is, of course, mostly the same after Wally dies. As unacceptable as it feels to do things like laundry and running errands and patrolling with Bruce and training with Tim and the Team and shooting the shit with Babs—all of those things happen, in gradual succession, after Wally dies. And Dick just has to live with the voice in his head that observes, very quietly, that none of those things will ever involve Wally again. No birthdays, no holidays, no camping trips, no weddings or graduations or weekend visits or weekly lunches, or even just fast food eaten on rooftops or a phone call at three in the fucking morning.

Just a funeral.

Dick has lived through that with his family, with Jason. He’ll continue to live through that until he himself dies. As selfish and irrational as it is to resent the dead for being dead, he still does it. Two years ago, eleven years ago—it doesn’t matter. Making peace with their deaths never feels like peace. And now Wally is another set of memories and regrets and values to carry forward and somehow make peace with. It’s not weakness for Dick to say that it’s all so very, very heavy and that he’s not ready to do that yet. It might be weakness for him to say he’s not sure he’ll ever be ready to do that again, but. No one has to know that yet.

In the meantime, no one expects him to be one-hundred-percent-functioning, which is fortunate. Unlike Artemis, who has thrown herself back into herowork as what she has privately admitted to Dick is a distraction from her and Wally’s empty Palo Alto apartment, Dick feels vaguely repulsed by the idea of running any missions in the near future.

“So don’t,” Artemis says around a mouthful of chow mein. They’re in Dick’s Blüdhaven apartment scarfing down greasy leftovers that Dick knows they’re both going to regret eating in a few hours. For the last two weeks, Artemis has been taking Dick’s bed while he sleeps on the couch in something of an unspoken arrangement; it was simply good to know that someone else was sleeping in the other room. Dick also knows that Artemis doesn’t want to deal with the move to another apartment until the Team is truly on its feet again. He would’ve offered to help, but Artemis already knows he would and would call him if she truly wanted it. “God knows there’s enough workaholics on this team to cover you.” She gestures at herself with a wave of her chopsticks. “I’m actually kind of relieved that you’re not one of them, Dick.”

Dick snorts and stuffs his mouth with Kung Pao chicken, holding the takeout container high above Brucely’s pleading eyes and whine-laced huffs of breath. “But I usually am. I don’t know why this time is any different.”

“It’s probably the universe trying to tell you something.”

“Oh? Like what?”

Artemis leans forward and taps his chest with her chopsticks, greasy food stains bedamned. “Like _maybe_ that you should take some time to actually grieve instead of packing your grief away in little brain boxes to study and dissect never. I know that’s what you did with Jason. Canary told me how flighty you were about counselling, and I bet you were just as bad about it when she asked you about it a week ago.”

“Are _you_ getting counselling?”

“Damn straight I am. I may be burying myself in hero shit for some of the wrong reasons, but it’s also for some of the right reasons. I’m getting counselling so that I can sort out which reasons are which.”

Dick glances at Artemis from the corner of his eye as he turn-slides off the bar stool to make the two-step walk to his fridge. He opens the fridge door and grabs two beers off the top shelf. On an impish impulse, he grins and tosses one of the bottles behind his head at her. Without looking, he knows she caught it when he hears the _crack_ of the bottle cap. Dick closes the fridge door and turns around, back leaning against the freezer door. Artemis raises an eyebrow at him as she takes a swig out of her beer.

She looks too old. There is hair falling out of her ponytail and framing her face, which is decorated with worry lines and the requisite bags hanging under her eyes. She’s wearing a tank top and Dick’s very oldest pair of Gotham Academy sweats, a green-brown bruise under the shoulder strap where someone grabbed her too hard during training. But the very worst of it is the life in her eyes, the life where Wally lives and they get married and _maybe_ have kids (Wally was more insistent about that than Artemis) and grow old together. Artemis looks like she’s already lived it and re-lived it and wishing she could re-live it again. As many people as Dick’s lost—parents, an aunt and a cousin, a little brother, a best friend—he’s never lost a lover.

“When Wally and I—retired…” Artemis shakes her head a little. “It was what Wally wanted. I went along with it because I loved him and he meant more to me than the adrenaline rush, which meant I loved him _a lot_. He never tried to give me an ultimatum—him or heroics, I mean—because I’m sure he knew I would’ve been pissed, and he would have been right. But I knew that if only one of us was doing the hero thing, there was always going to be this bitter tension between us. Wally would’ve hated the danger I was in. I would’ve hated dealing with that hatred, partly because in all practicality, I agreed with his decision to retire. College didn’t seem like the time to dabble in vigilantism.” She laughs. “Seems stupid, when you think about all the shit we did in high school.”

Dick hums and takes a long pull from his beer. “Kind of.”

“But Wally never really _needed_ to be Kid Flash, you know? He _wanted_ it, worked just as hard as any of the rest of us, but I _needed_ to be a hero like a fish needs water. Being a hero meant I _wasn’t_ my sister or my dad. It gave me new friends, a new family, the ability to trust. I built my house on it. I wouldn’t have left if Wally hadn’t left first.”

Dick hunches his shoulders and tries not to lift the veil of impassiveness from his face. “Gee, I really see how great being a hero is when you talk about how much you loved it before you just _left_ —.”

“ _Don’t_ say it like that,” Artemis snaps, stiffly holding her beer bottle with one scar-knuckled hand. There’s a terse, brittle silence. Then she sighs. “But Dick, here’s the thing: Wally was _right_ , danger aside. I needed to grow out of my dependence on the Team. I needed those years to figure out what I wanted from my life beyond training and missions and more training. I wouldn’t have gotten that if I hadn’t left the Team. And sure, I missed it like hell—I agreed to the whole fake death/undercover double agent thing pretty fast, didn’t I?—but I’m better for having taken my time sorting out my shit beforehand. So here’s my point, Dick: you need to take that time, too. You’ve been putting it off for years. Wally would’ve—Wally would have wanted you to have this. He was always trying to tell you that.”

They go to bed an hour or so after that conversation. Dick lies back on the couch and listens to the sirens keening in the streets below, and doesn’t sleep.

Well, he’s always loved being on the road, circus kid that he is. And Wally and him never _did_ take that post-high school graduation road trip, did they?

And that’s really how it all begins.

-)(-

Dick doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Kaldur and Artemis have instructions to pass on his regards to the Team. He spends a little time with Tim, a little time with Babs. They all wish him well.

“Don’t come back too quickly,” Babs says, after she walks him home and they’re standing in front of his apartment complex. “It’s going to be quiet around here for a while.”

She throws him a knowing look that Dick can’t help but smile at in return. “I’ll be back in time for the next world-ending crisis, Mom,” he says.

Babs makes a face. “At least get me a souvenir.”

“A ’I survived an attempted alien invasion and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’ t-shirt?”

“I expect something tacky-bordering-on-ridiculous. And maybe a snow globe.”

“A snow globe it is.” Dick’s hands clench and unclench in his jacket pockets. “Um, hey, are you sure that—”

Babs cuts in before he can say anything else. “Grayson, you don’t need my permission to go. We’ll be fine, Tim and I are kind of awesome. And additionally, B is back. The world truly can hold its breath for your return.”

“I know, I—” Dick furrows his eyebrows together in slight frustration. “That’s not what I was going to ask.”

Babs’s face softens. “I mean it. Everyone here knows that you and Wally were as thick as thieves. It’s natural and healthy to grieve. I’m actually glad you’re doing this. If you had tried to handle it the way you handled Jason’s death, this would be a much different and much less friendly conversation. So please, _please_ go on this road trip thing and figure your head out.”

“You sound just like Artemis,” Dick grumbles.

“We may or may not have talked about you when you were in the shower the other night.”

Dick swears. “Jesus, Babs, what’s next? A sit-down intervention?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Babs says. “But you don’t need an intervention. You’re on the right track.”

Dick shifts his weight from foot to foot. Shifts it again. The night air feels like a balm to his face as a rare breeze trundles through the darkened street. “Babs, I know I said I was sorry, but—I thought I should say it again. Before I left.”

Babs looks down at her sneakers. She doesn’t say anything. There is a nervously long pause, and then her breath finally trickles out in a sigh. “Dick. I’m obviously not happy about the lying, and the secrets. But I’m not sure I would’ve done it differently. Bruce taught us the same tactics. We were in a hard place, and you had hard decisions to make. It’s not really my call to judge you. Sure, I can forgive you, but you clearly haven’t forgiven yourself. That’s at least part of why you’re leaving, right?”

Dick blinks. “Yeah, or I’m really looking forward to trying my luck in Vegas.”

Babs punches him in the arm. “Alright, smartass. Spare five minutes for self-reflection if you can. I hope Artemis is eating all of your cereal right now.”

There’s not much else to it. Two and a half days after deciding to leave, he’s on his bike, on the road.

-)(-

And driving is easy. Half of his concentration is on the road and the other half isn’t on anything at all. His communicators are all off, except for the one that he doesn’t ever turn off. Regardless, they’re all silent.

It all feels good in a way Dick can’t remember feeling so deeply: his bike humming underneath him, the wind beating against his helmet, the smell of rich dark earth, the sun frying the back of his neck.

Dick had not remembered to pack sunscreen. His brain abruptly conjures an absurd image of ever-methodical Tim pulling a bottle of sunscreen out of his utility belt, and he stifles a giggle that threatens to rip free from his chest. Then he thinks that—well, it’s even more absurd not to laugh at something when he’s alone and driving down a highway without having seen another soul for miles. So Dick laughs.

It’s so easy that Dick finds himself skating through the states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana. The days blur together a little too quickly. Once, he’s forced to stay in a motel all day to escape the onslaught of a thunderstorm. There’s nothing to do but drink bad coffee and watch the rain pound the pavement outside. It feels as curiously freeing as driving does, and Dick realizes that the abundance of free time and lack of anywhere to be are the cause of it. He resolves to drive slower and stop more often.

However, the absence of responsibility is a curse as much as it is a blessing. Dick’s sleep schedule is already fucked beyond reason. He feels bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at one in the morning and ready to drop at three in the afternoon. Driving is not the kind of activity that allows for frequent napping, but he can’t sleep for more than five hours in a row, and when he’s not sleeping or driving, it is a conscious effort to push away the thoughts that he had previously been too busy to entertain for long. Thoughts like, _they’re all just children._ Or, _everyone Artemis knows and loves, with the exception of three people, mourned her for months with the full-blooded certainty that she was dead and rotting._ Or, again, _they’re really all just children. Was I ever that young?_ Dick doesn’t know what to do with those thoughts, so he leaves them in the dark.

He takes a more northern route that lands him in Chicago in the middle of one night.

Dick doesn’t bother getting up early the next morning. Instead, the July heat shimmers at his heels as he reads street signs and has a look around the city. He buys coffee and a doughnut in the late morning, a pretzel with sweet mustard dip in the early afternoon. He finds a hideous pair of sunglasses decorated with neon zigzags that he briefly considers buying for Babs, but doesn’t. He can do better, find worse.

He’s made it halfway down Navy Pier when the sun sets and the red sky behind it crashes almost violently into Lake Michigan. When the street lights snap on one by one, Dick gets on his bike for a long night of driving. He’s not tired. Sleeping four hours the previous night has left him with a surge of energy just beneath his skin. If he closes his eyes and listens, Dick can half-hear it fizzing: _you need to take that time, too._

Away from Chicago, the sky is clearer and the stars are visible. He follows them out of Illinois and into Iowa.

-)(-

The sun rises. Dick stops to watch.  

-)(-

Fields fly past in a golden blur under a dry blue sky that seems to swallow the horizon. That surplus of energy begins to dwindle. Dick looks at his watch. It’s eight in the morning.

He stops to sleep in some motel in western Iowa, and dreams of Jason.

-)(-

It’s not an unfamiliar dream. Dick closes his eyes, opens them to the empty halls of Gotham Academy. Golden light pours in through the windows facing west and pools into rectangles growing slanted as the dull afternoon turns late. He’s wearing his old Gotham Academy uniform, retired three years ago, and Dick reflexively sticks a finger between the tie’s knot and his neck, and pulls the knot away. It feels like he’s underwater.

 A glint of light catches his eye to the right and Dick half-turns his head. It’s a trophy case, but instead of being filled with trophies, it’s filled with framed photos, almost like Bruce’s desk is. Without examining the trophy case to any closer degree, Dick is suddenly and terribly sure that the photos _are_ from Bruce’s desk.

His head twists fully as he zeroes in on one photo. It’s Christmas, two years ago. Bruce is smiling warmly at the camera, which is strange enough to warrant its own photo, but Dick had snapped it for the sole reason of catching Jason’s incredulous gaping at the ugly Christmas sweater Dick had given him. Eyes bugging out, tongue quick on the draw, disbelieving fingers grasping the brown felt of ten reindeer frolicking across red wool, and not yet aware that there was a leather-bound copy of _Mansfield Park_ buried in the tissue paper beneath.

“There’s only supposed to be nine reindeer, dipshit. You remembered it wrong.”

Dick doesn’t remember moving closer to the trophy case for any kind of better look, but when he looks away from the photo, the hallway has shifted in perspective. Jason, as full of nerve as the day he died, glares at him with half-lidded eyes as he leans against a row of lockers on the opposite wall.

He’s dressed in his Gotham Academy uniform too, never retired. The tie is loose around his neck. Part of his dress shirt is untucked and Dick has the irrational urge to tuck it in for him. “You remembered it all wrong.”

Dick turns back to the photo. The red of the sweater is dripping onto Jason’s chest. His vision shudders as Jason’s gray t-shirt darkens and the now-blood soaks into the green rug underneath the Christmas tree.

“Hey, asshole, _look at me._ ”

Dick turns back to Jason. The same red stain is spreading against the crisp white of Jason’s dress shirt.

“I never saw this,” he says.

Jason scoffs and pushes off the lockers with one foot. “Yeah, you didn’t see anything. You weren’t there.”

Dick doesn’t say anything. It never helps, in these dreams. Jason ambles toward him in a way Dick is sure he never would’ve done when he was alive. It’s too controlled, too graceful, too much of a move designed to manipulate. It’s how Dick might have moved if he was the one on offense. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t all clean like this. I got blown into a million billion pieces instead.”

“No,” Dick says, tongue numb in his mouth. “That’s not what happened either.”

Jason turns his head to the side to spit out blood and what looks like a tooth. “Dickie dearest, I wasn’t talking about the bomb.” He grins and it is very, very red.

Dick closes his eyes. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

A hand, tacky with what Dick can only assume is more blood, pats his cheek. “How about your life? Would you give that for me?”

“Yes.”

Dick can hear Jason’s sigh, so similar to Babs’s sigh just days ago. “I asked that wrong. Of course you’d give your life, _hero._ How about your soul?”

He opens his eyes. Jason is gone, but the blood he spat out is still shining on the wall, the tooth on the floor below it. But it’s too big to be a tooth. In fact, it looks like a—

Dick throws his body away from the newly identified grenade, but the rush and roar of heated sound and the searingly bright light billowing from too close an angle overtake him almost instantaneously, and there’s no time to—

-)(-

When he jerks awake at around one in the afternoon, Dick is displeased to discover that he’s sweat through the sheets. Despite the undesirable dampness, Dick stretches out on the bed.

“What a fucking drama queen,” he mutters. He’s not sure if he’s talking about Jason or talking about _himself_ for dreaming up Jason.

The dreams with Jason were the only kind of dreams Dick had had for two years. They weren’t nightly occurrences, or even weekly, anymore; they had hung over him heavily for the first six months, and eventually slowed to twice a week and then to once a month. The dreams favored the backyard of Wayne Manor, but the Batcave and Gotham Academy weren’t uncommon sceneries. Usually, it would be some blurry replay of a memory Dick had, or some snapshot of a future he thought could’ve existed if Jason weren’t, you know, still dead. But sometimes he was aware of his own death and its circumstances, and those dreams were always the most unpleasant as Jason threw all of Dick’s most self-loathing self-observations in his face.

“’How about your soul,’ he asks,” Dick mutters again. “ _Ugh._ ”

-)(-

At the end of it all, at the end of shitty motel stays and brief tourist-y excursions and driving and an amount of fast food that would horrify Alfred into silence, Dick ends up in Montana. He stops at a local bed-and-breakfast, and this time, he doesn’t wake up and keep driving after a day or two of sleep and exploration of cheesy landmarks. And you could say it’s the mountains, or the lakes, or any of the beautiful scenery that Montana undoubtedly does possess, but really? Dick doesn’t know why, and doesn’t particularly care to know why.

Maybe it’s just the quiet.

-)(-

And sure enough, that’s when things go to shit in a shit-basket.

-)(-

He doesn’t process how thoroughly he’s out of the loop until Tim calls. Dick swears and half-trips out of bed and an hour of sleep to the duffel bag by the bathroom door to dig out the trilling emergency communicator. It is five thirty in the morning and Dick hasn’t heard from anyone since he left. It’s been what—a week and a half? Maybe two weeks? “…’lo?”

_"Dick?”_

“Tim! Timmy, how’s it…how’s it going?” Dick runs a hand through his hair, which is unsurprisingly a mess. He knows their working hours are shit, but it must be about seven thirty in Gotham City, which somehow makes less sense than if there wasn’t a time difference. “Everything okay? What’s up?”

Tim is silent. Dick’s already shoving his legs into sweatpants, before he thinks better of it and grabs his least shabby pair of jeans. _“Uh…have you heard from Bruce, recently? ...like, **really** recently?”_

Shit, shit, _shit._ Dick feels disoriented from the insane spectrum of emotions he’s been dragged through in the last minute: the warm edge of dozing after a nightmare, then startled into confusion and now slowly mounting dread. “I haven’t heard from _anyone_ in a while. What’s going on?”

Tim is quiet for too long for it to be anything but more-worst-than-the-worst news. _“Well, as of four days ago, Bruce is missing.”_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a sucker for road trip AUs. Since I hadn't seen one quite like this written, I decided to do it myself.
> 
> The title is from Lethargy by Bastille.


End file.
